Tag: Sales

What’s something you’ve always dreamed of owning? Maybe something you’ve never even voiced out loud to anyone else because it’s so far out of your current reach? It could be owning an ocean-front house on the beaches of Barbados or parking a Lamborghini in your garage. It might be throwing a Louis Vuitton bag over your shoulder or having a passport full of stamps from countries all over the world.

Whatever it is that you’ve dreamed of buying that’s a little (or maybe even a lot) outside of your current budget, have you ever thought about how you could actually achieve that goal? Or is it just a far-off dream that you think in the back of your mind will never actually come to reality?

The first step in achieving a far-out goal is to start thinking of it as though it HAS happened. Instead of “I want to own a beach-front property,” think to yourself “I own a beach-front property.” And then start figuring out how to actually achieve that goal. How much money would it cost you to purchase that? How much would you have to set aside from each paycheck, and how long would it take you to have enough saved up? Is it realistic to achieve that goal at your current income level?

If you’re working a typical salary job, that might mean you need to ask for a raise at your next annual review to get you a little closer to your goal, go for a promotion, or apply to a completely different job if the financial growth opportunities are not currently available where you are.

What if you’re working in a commission-based role though?

We hear a lot of concerns from candidates when we start talking about the eventual transition to commission that our sales reps go through. People are concerned about not having a steady income or losing a customer down the line and seeing a significant drop in their paycheck at the end of the week. And yeah, we aren’t going to lie – those situations are possibilities. But why focus on the worst case scenario instead of the best case scenario?

One of the best things about working a commission-based role is that you don’t have to rely on anyone else to give you a raise. You want to take home some additional money at the end of the week? Put in the extra work, and you can immediately see the reward for that financially.

So back to our example of making that far-off dream a reality….it’s honestly a lot easier to break down exactly how much additional work you need to put in to achieve that goal when you’re working on commission. In our world, we can break it down to how many additional customer shipments you need to haul, and suddenly it makes that far-off dream a much more achievable goal.

You want that $200,000 Lamborghini in 5 years? Well when we break that down, it means moving 10 more shipments every week for the next 5 years, and you’ll have the money for that car. Is that going to take a lot of work? Absolutely. But having a clear understanding of what you need to do to meet a financial goal is one of the biggest perks of working on straight commission.

The future is entirely in your hands, and you have yourself to be proud of or disappointed with for meeting or not meeting your goals.

So yes, commission could be a scary thing if you just focus on everything that could go wrong. But why not look at everything that could go right and the endless opportunities you have to increase your income? There aren’t very many roles that give you the opportunity to achieve your far-out financial goals quite like a commission-based sales role does.

If you ask just about anyone to fill in the blank on the above sentence, you’re most likely going to get answers like: Pushy. Sleazy. Annoying. Dishonest. Greedy.

Even a search on Google predicts words like: The worst. Bad sources of information. Liars.

The media portrays salespeople as being this way. Jordan Belfort lied and cheated his way to the top in Wolf of Wall Street. The company J.T. Marlin was founded on greed in Boiler Room. Movies and TV shows depict over and over the average salesperson as being deceitful.

But all of this is just a stereotype. An inaccurate representation of an entire industry.

As a sales organization, we have to fight these stereotypes every single day. Prospective clients don’t necessarily want another “sales call”. Prospective employees don’t necessarily want their job title to be “salesperson”. Because the first thing that comes to mind when they hear the word sales is all of the negative portrayals.

These misconceptions are just that though: misconceptions.

Good salespeople are simply passionate about their product or service. They know that not every person is going to be a potential customer, and if they find out their offering doesn’t make sense for you, they’ll stop calling. They understand that at the end of the day, sales is about making the customer walk away happy. They know they won’t be able to have repeat sales if the initial one is built on lies.

If all salespeople were lying, pushy, annoying individuals, no one would buy a car or house and leave feeling excited about it. No one would be satisfied purchasing a wedding dress. And no one would ever answer a sales call.

But people are satisfied with help from a salesperson more often than not. We just don’t always see that in the media.

At Bridge, we know that the sale means nothing if we can’t follow through and deliver the service that we are providing. If we can’t find trucks for our shipments and communicate along the way, no one is going to continue doing business with us. There’s no point in being dishonest or greedy because we’d rather have our service speak for itself.

The stereotypes surrounding salespeople will probably prevail, but we’ll be fighting those myths everyday through honest communication and genuine relationships.